Since 2008, an independent look at challenges and opportunities in sports and financial investing, with occasional diversions as my mood takes me. Nothing is for sale, and this not a Profit and Loss report either. They're boring.

Tuesday, 4 March 2014

Life is never dull. By sheer chance, my early morning perusal of my Twitter timeline drew me to the latest post from Steve over at Daily25 and what do I find but my name mentioned a couple of times. The first reference was innocent enough:

This morning I woke up to a Graeme-esk (TFA) length tirade (the length was Graeme-esk, not the tirade) in my comments section. I felt Skeeves voice should not languish in the comments section where only a few people will see them and instead I will directly answer his comments in a new blog post. Hat tip to Cassini for showing me how to produce lots of content this way.

I think Steve meant Graeme-esque, but he's Australian so we'll let that go. The second mention of my name was in a "Skeeve said / Steve said" 'discussion' where my post from yesterday was quoted in reference to the AFC Chester v Nuneaton Town [no longer Borough] 3:3 draw. Here's Steve's comment about Skeeve's follow-up email comment:

Steve: Yes it was very very lucky. Chester had a player sent off very early and kept taking the lead. Here is a quote from Cassini about your pick as well “including fluking a 3:3 draw in the AFC Chester v Nuneaton Borough game!”, I do not see you commenting on his blog about that. This is a real bugbear of mine and I have posted about it before. When you have a losing bet where woodwork was hit or penalties missed you are the first to let everyone know in your recap emails, o woe is me, it’s not that I didn’t pick well, it was that the woodwork got in the way or a player didn’t play his best or the ref was a cheat. This was your quote on the Chester win. “That’s more like it. Chester and Nuneaton shared points in a high-scoring 3:3 draw”. So you are not very consistent in your commenting, there have been a number of last minute goals and missed penalties that have gone your way, but I have never heard once you say how lucky we got. It’s betting, luck goes both ways but if someone was to read your emails, they would assume all the gods ever created were against you. I feel your ego gets in the way sometimes and it is the case on many of your recap emails.

I can assure Steve, and anyone else reading, that not one god has ever existed or been created. Not even the 'one true god', and which 'one' that is of course varies depending on geography and your choice of parents. Anyway, the quote from Cassini about fluking the draw when it is 3:3 or above is one I have used since at least 2011, probably longer, and usually to describe my own XX Draws selections, and its origins are in the fact that when you are looking to select a draw, you are looking for a low-scoring game.The 0:0 is the perfect draw, the 1:1 is perfectly acceptable, the 2:2 is a little embarrassing, but selecting a draw that ends 3:3 or above is frankly very embarrassing. The draw was value because your expectation of goals was lower than the market's expectation, but you were totally wrong and the fact that the game ended in a draw was pure luck. I do see how Skeeve's comment on the selection "That’s more like it. Chester and Nuneaton shared points in a high-scoring 3:3 draw” could get under Steve's skin, because "that's more like it" suggests everything went to plan, a perfect 0:0 perhaps, yet it clearly didn't. It was a goal-fest, and the fact the teams ended with three apiece was a fluke. Perhaps Skeeve meant his words as an "about time we had some luck go our way" comment.I'm not sure what Skeeve's 'official' results are for this season, but I do know that backing his selections as singles to level stakes, he is blowing the other professionals I follow and track out of the water. I've written before about my dislike of betting multiples, and following Skeeve by my rules has been very profitable:

An 18% ROI using Pinnacle's prices is not to be sniffed at. Backing Skeeve's selections to level stakes using his recommended multiples is also profitable:

Skeeve does vary his stake size which is another no for me unless I know the edge size. Here are the full numbers for the Professionals:

Betslayer commented:

Seems very petty to include Paul Finns draws (as Jonny G) on a bad week for him, when he has provided his draws since July on SOTDOC and betontarget.com forum for FREE.I must admit its the first time I've seen him hit a blank so its a little ironicRegards

Now I am very confused. After being bombarded with Tweets in the first-person plural saying that sotdraw were "making my XX Draws look pants", I rather assumed that Jonny was part of the show and that the multiple Tweets promoting the selections were a cry for attention.

Who Paul Finn is, I have no idea, and I'm afraid I have never heard of the betontarget forum, but my attention was caught on Feb 26th, which was only last week, which is why following the selections started this weekend. I like draws, as I have mentioned several times before, and I am always interested in comparing my selections with those of others.Obviously I can't back-date selections to before they caught my attention, but as I said yesterday, when you have an edge, it makes no difference in the long-run when you start because the profits will come, and I'm not one to get too excited or despondent until we have several weeks and selections behind us.What was quite interesting to me was that three of sotdraw's selections were XX Draw selections also:Sochaux v Bordeaux (2:0), Cagliari v Udinese (3:0) and Ajaccio v Lille (2:3).

11 comments:

I won't dispute a low goal expectation is a rich source for finding potential draws but it needen't be the only method.

Another method is finding a team near the bottom playing at home against a stronger team. You do get these teams that are decent coming forward but can't keep a clean sheet. Quite a few fall in to the 'too good to go down' catagory but at the end of the season you see they have drawn a stack of home games.

I must say I feel I have reached a near euphoric state over the delicious levels of cattiness on display in the betting blog world. It seems that the steady decline in etiquette in the modern world is being accelerated at an alarming rate by the depravity of social media. At this rate it will not be long before you are known as the Perez Hilton of betting blogs as you highlight grudges and stir the pot of others.

On a separate note I notice that Berkshire Hathaway has posted their results beating the previous year to much fanfare. Unfortunately some cowardly wags have dared to suggest that Mr Buffet still has yet to outperform the S&P 500 for the past five years, oh the temerity of some people. I am a big fan of simplistic drip feeding investing in large index trackers with there most agreeably low management feeds as I believe are you. Surely you can concoct a blog post about the dangers of stock picking for long term returns and hopefully relate it to the betting world.

The example that sprung to my mind was the lovely Graeme over at TFA. I am constantly haranguing him about providing a breakdown of simply backing each team he highlights once and to level stakes (a broad based index approach?). This would be in contrast to the leveraged backing of teams the more they appear on the various systems (individual stock picking?).

I look forward to hearing more of your excellent well formed thoughts.

I must say I feel I have reached a near euphoric state over the delicious levels of cattiness on display in the betting blog world. It seems that the steady decline in etiquette in the modern world is being accelerated at an alarming rate by the depravity of social media. At this rate it will not be long before you are known as the Perez Hilton of betting blogs as you highlight grudges and stir the pot of others.

On a separate note I notice that Berkshire Hathaway has posted their results beating the previous year to much fanfare. Unfortunately some cowardly wags have dared to suggest that Mr Buffet still has yet to outperform the S&P 500 for the past five years, oh the temerity of some people. I am a big fan of simplistic drip feeding investing in large index trackers with there most agreeably low management feeds as I believe are you. Surely you can concoct a blog post about the dangers of stock picking for long term returns and hopefully relate it to the betting world.

The example that sprung to my mind was the lovely Graeme over at TFA. I am constantly haranguing him about providing a breakdown of simply backing each team he highlights once and to level stakes (a broad based index approach?). This would be in contrast to the leveraged backing of teams the more they appear on the various systems (individual stock picking?).

I look forward to hearing more of your excellent well formed thoughts.

I've just replied to Steve over there, but you were right about the "that's more like it" part of the recap e-mail.

I definitely didn't expect a goalless draw (I've now published the whole preview at Steve's blog) and of course it was lucky, but Chester have now shared points in five of their six home games against top-eight Skrill Premier teams. I guess this bet had it all - it was a good bet, a winning bet and a lucky bet. :)

SOT Draws are indeed the picks of a another twitter user who posts selections on his site.

He does offer some of his own in-play selections via the bet-on-target forum but they're not performing well, he's currently about 1.1% down after about 250 bets. Is still relatively early days and could be bad variance biting but being only 1.1% down is probably pretty surprising to those who've read his garbled 'essays', lack of attention to price and team strength, and his bizarre, cherry picked, interpretation of game state. Incidentally, though not aimed specifically at gambling, the work on gamestate and shot data by @jameswgrayson and statsbomb is significantly more useful and definitely worth checking out.

Anyway, potentially his losses should be bigger as not entirely convinced the prices he posts were actually always available. A couple of months back I checked 2 picks on SBO, who places his bets with, 30 seconds after his post and they were several ticks shorter. Could've been the price moved following his bets but given how much he likes a conspiracy I'm sure he'd be accusing you of faking prices if he'd experienced something similar. He'd certainly be ranting and abusing relentlessly anyone with a losing record after over 200 bets.

Speaking of abuse, have found it very strange that Pete N, surely one of the nicest guys in the betting blogging world, is seemingly working to some extent with Jonny again. Just a few months back Pete had been the victim of one of Jonny's week long meltdowns, receiving abusive tweets accusing him of all sorts including plagiarising his work, providing a losing service and even (rather surreally) that one of premier betting's tipters didn't actually exist.

I must be in a minority as I have found Jonny's work on game state very informative . He is the only one that I am aware of that keys shot creation to show the expected goals in games . I have followed Jonny with interst on the pre off and yes a small sample - 63 games but the ROI was a healthy 23% . In terms of integrity I have not heard anyone contest that before but I suppose you cannot please everyone . Jonny has posted all his pre off bets and in running bets and obviously in running prices move very quickly so you will not always get the in running price quoted but sometimes I have seen better prices available then quoted . I think it Is a shame to keep attacking Jonny as he obviously has many years of experience and I think we should encourage people to write about their thoughts and not keep trying to put people down . I would think there is room for more people to write about subjects like gamestate and we should not conclude one chap is better then another in an instant as that is slightly irrational .

I don't know Jonny personally but his site is interesting and I am sure that integrity is not an issue because he writes just as many articles highlighting his losing bets .

Well, this is amusing if a little awkward. The last post from anonymous defending Jonny is quite clearly from Mr Grossmark himself. His writing style and stock phrases are pretty easy to spot anyway but his quirky take on punctuation, namely leaving a space before full stops and question marks is what makes it even more obvious. He does it on all his tweets and comments on here, can't recall seeing any other bloggers/tweeters do that.

It's what he also does on his previous anonymous comment above where he assumes that because Cassini previously had a profile pic with an Asian woman that he's probably got an internet bride. Nice. He made the same comment during one of his twitter meltdowns a few days back. Well done Jonny, a racist ad hom. Stay classy, fella.

Anonymous, to be fair Jonny tends to be the one doing the attacking. He talks about being attacked all the time but from what I've seen it's frequently just people asking questions of his method. My day job's as a scientist so good methodology is all important to me. The original tweets from Hagik & cornerstats are still there & they were asking entirely reasonable questions. People shouldn't be calling him mental etc.. but when he tweets abuse at people for days on end it does appear a little/a lot mad!

He'd probably get less criticism if he didnt spend so much of his time ranting at others. I only look on his feed intermittently but he's always criticising people. Saw him badgering & questioning a guy if follow from opta, criticising the output on their website & a few months later he was crying about not getting an invite to the opta conference!

Re your points, I'll have to take your word for it that he writes about his losing bets as you obviously follow him more closely. He's appeared something of an after timer from what i've seen on twitter as he can selectively recall the successful predictions from his reams of tweets & blogs. Obviously whoever wants to write about betting & game state should be able to do so but some will be better than others & some may be of no use at all. I've only read a few of his articles, but they were very poorly constructed with definitive conclusions reached despite nowhere near enough data. That has to be a massive red flag for anyone. Others seem to be strange after-timed reviews of games. There are a lot of v impressive analytics guys around not just the ones mentioned above who are producing work for free that I've certainly used to refine certain betting strategies. The fact he has years of experience actually reflects worse on him as he ought to have developed his knowledge more by now. Remember there's a distinction between experience & expertise, experience means very little without putting in the requisite effort to improve your skills.

Seems odd that people on here say Jonny does the attacking when a number of posters are attacking him under various names that are clearly one or two linked accounts. Just to clear up one of ridiculous claims, over 250 bets placed on the betontarget forum I have only occasionally seen the price be unavailable and as started above have a few times got a better price. To be honest any negative comments about being -1.1% should be taken with a pinch of salt as Cassini's very own FTL proves staying so close to breakeven or profit is not as easy as some would make out ...especially ones with no record at all.

About Me

I have had a life-long interest in sports and after studying Pure Mathematics with Statistics at secondary school, have been fascinated by odds and probability.
The first system I came up with was a simple one - back the favourite and double up after a loss until a winner. Simple enough in theory, and I told my Dad about it. Not being a betting man himself, he ran it by some of his colleagues, and came home to tell me that it wouldn’t work because a long losing run would mean that the bank would be empty. Then there was always the possibility that the winner would be returned at odds-on, meaning that the total returns would not match the outlay. Not what a ten year old wants to hear! Only slightly daunted, I then went on a search for the Holy Grail, the secret to riches that I knew was out there somewhere. Finally in 2004 I stumbled across an article about Betting Exchanges and four years on I am able to make a steady profit. I am at that age where I can start thinking about retirement and anything I make from trading sports will bring that day forward.